December 8, 2011

August 5, 2010

The press release for You Can’t Win has an interesting centerpiece quote that is worth noting right away to put the entire show in context…

“We were and are both very depressed individuals and do not really view ourselves as really fitting into any group, but as persons who kind of sit on the cusp of several. More as loners than anything else.”
-PEZ and Joshua Blank

What we find interesting in this quote is what does one, or in this case, two, do when they feel depressed, not fitting into a group, like loners, and on the periphery? Of course in the case of PEZ and Joshua Blank, there is a bit of graffiti, stickering, and ‘zine making involved in coping (if we can call it coping) with being a depressed, artistic individual. But that seems a bit simplistic of what You Can’t Win is all about. We don’t think the show is about being on the outside looking in, as the quote seems to suggest, but rather an exhibition of being in the inside looking further to the inside.

Both PEZ and Blank’s work captures a mood of being found. In PEZ’ work, his iconic graffiti style is applied onto found album covers, vinyl, and stickers. It fits the graffiti and stickering; crawling and popping out of city walls and zines; colorful, spontaneous, between the cracks. It creeps up onto record sleeves, onto found paintings, and discarded wood. These are the things that the inside finds and uses when the outside has no use for it anymore; a painting of a sawmill that PEZ found on the street has now been re-imagined with his distinct colorful re-branding. Saw goes for a large coastal painting that is PEZ largest piece in the show: the beach now has an over-turned car and day-glo pyramids.

And then there are Joshua’s photographs: they allow all of us to be voyeurs into a world we have never been given access to. One of the main photos on his wall is of Dash Snow, powerful not because of the infamous nature of the recently passed-artist, but of the nature of the shot itself. Only the inside has been here, with no outsider filter or poised expectation, just two artists in the moment of non-preconceived notions of art and graffiti. They are just there, not self-conscious but self-aware. And with all of Blank’s photos, everyone is just there, being, living, not acting or living out others’ fantasies of what an artistic life should look like. That is why the Snow portrait, along with the other portraits in the show, feel so real: because they just are….